Compendex: Quick Start Guide: About

Compendex (sometimes called Ei Compendex) is considered the most current and comprehensive engineering literature database available to serious practitioners. It is produced by the scientific/technical/academic publisher Elsevier, and it includes 190 distinct engineering disciplines. It contains more than 20 million records and is updated with more than 30,000 new records weekly. Records are selected by professional indexers using the Engineering Index Thesaurus to ensure users can find citation details and links to full-text documents. With Compendex, engineers can be confident the information they find is relevant, accurate and of exceptional quality.

Engineering Village is the "platform" or "interface" that enables precise search and discovery of current, archival and interdisciplinary content engineers need to do their jobs. The platform can can host as many as 14 separate databases in which content from global publishers is indexed from journals, conference proceedings, trade publication, dissertations, standards, books, technical reports and more. Multiple subscriptions can be searched simultaneously (as shown below): 

Presently, VDOT only has subscriptions to 2 of the 14 databases that are commercially available: Compendex (Elsevier's flagship database), and the engineering database Knovel, so when VDOT employees access the subscription this is what they will see:  

The default setting is to search both Compendex and Knovel simultaneously, but users can adjust that to their choice.